


Thursday

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [32]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cancer, Character Death, Emotional Hurt, Multi, Sad Ending, Sick Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:00:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23791216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Taylor learns she's going to die on a Thursday.
Relationships: Danny Hebert/Kurt/Lacey
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [32]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 35
Kudos: 191





	1. Thursday

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for like, grief and death and cancer in general.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor learns she's going to die on a Thursday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for grief, death, and I guess accepting the inevitability of death.

Taylor learns she’s going to die on a Thursday.

The day comes after weeks of worsening nausea, dizziness, an inability to keep food down, and extreme headaches accompanied by periods of unconsciousness. Her father’s medical insurance covers the assessment, and by the end of it, they sit with a man in his late sixties, staring at charts that make little sense in between the crushing pain in her head, diagrams and pictures of her brain, pictures of the growth, the tumour.

“It’s terminal,” he explains, motioning at the chart with a carefully blank expression. “I’m so sorry.”

Dad crumples, deflates, looks like a puppet who had his strings cut, left in a heap in a chair, unseeing.

Taylor doesn’t feel much at all, weirdly. It’s just numbness, she stares at her hands and expects them to shake, she wonders why her eyes aren’t wet, why her throat isn’t thick. She doesn’t feel like crying, she doesn’t feel like a lot, really, just empty, null, void. In the absence of her father, of his guidance, she looks up, thinks for a moment, and then opens her mouth.

“Can you tell me how long I have?”

* * *

Death by cancer is unpleasant, they all say. Not that she doesn’t believe them, even what she has now is painful and discomforting, but part of her thinks they aren’t saying it for the person who _has_ cancer. It’s unpleasant for everyone, she imagines, for her father, who looks at her with deadened eyes, to family friends who can’t quite bring themselves to offer condolences - after all, she’s not dead yet - to the principal who had looked at her with gaping, unbelieving eyes as she passed over a doctor’s note and a slip that would let her drop out of high school. No point, really, she wouldn’t be alive to finish the year. 

But for her, at least, there are drugs. The hard stuff, too, they didn’t skimp on it, didn’t have any reason to. Sure, addiction was a massive problem in Brockton and there was hardly a person who hadn’t, in some way, been affected by the opioid crisis or the ongoing alcoholism that plagues the city, but then her death made the prospect of a future addict moot. The drugs leave her high - there’s no other word for it - and pain-free, mostly, with her nausea crawling back to the pit of her skull. She can hold food down again, which is always a treat, and smells don’t make her want to vomit, which is even better.

But, even with all of that, she can still tell. It’s harder to wake up with each passing day, probably in part due to the gradually increasing dosage they have her on, but also in part due to the continued growth of the tumour. There were other options, ways to slow it down, but none to _stop_ the growth, or even remove it. It’s nestled too deep in, they’d be basically lobotomizing her at best if they tried to remove it, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t immediately grow back. The other options - chemo, more exotic methods - just delayed the inevitable and would ruin her body faster than the cancer did.

So, she’s fine. In the abstract. She doesn’t need to go to school anymore, she can eat and drink what she wants, she’s always floaty, always a little happy, like the better version of dissociation. She catches up on television, she starts to read books again, fantasy, things her mother left over, things that had been until this point too raw to consider opening. For the first time in six years she sits there and _reads_ the Hobbit, the thing her mother used to read to her at night; a bedtime story that had so much emotional weight to it that she had considered burning the book to ashes on a few of her worst days, before all of this.

She feels free.

Until she isn’t.

* * *

Predictably, the shakes start on the same sort of mundane, boring day of the week that nobody thinks about. A Wednesday, maybe, or a Tuesday, she’s having difficulties remembering. They’re not bad at the start, her fingers buzzing, stammering against the cover of her book, little involuntary hitches as the tumour presses against the part of her brain that handles mobility. She doesn’t think about it, though she does bring it up to the doctor for her weekly visit, who just shrugs and tells her, bluntly, it’s to be expected.

Unlike before, though, they rapidly escalate. Unlike the tumour, which had likely been benign until it wasn’t, apparently not an uncommon fixture in the world, what with the advent of super-powers, they don’t get better, only worse. It’s a sliding scale, too, they reach worsening peaks the longer she does things in a day, the shakes get harsher, vibrate up her arms, and only reset to her fingers - at first, anyway - when she wakes up the next day. Daily, too, they worsen, beginning with minor tremors in the fingers for the first week and then graduating into more violent seizes, cramps, full-body shudders she can’t control.

She hates it.

In a month, she can’t hold books anymore. She can barely turn _pages_ , she can’t eat with a normal spoon, she has to get one of the self-adjusting ones, the ones for people whose bodies shake, just like her. Her life becomes frustrating, everything she does is defined by the shakes, how difficult it is to walk, the drugs can only keep her floaty so much, and the shakes are an anchor, they drag her back down, pull her to the earth, lashing her in place. It’s a constant reminder, harsh and sharp in her ear: _you are dying_.

It’s here, she supposes, sometime during the blur of that month, the escalating emotions, the immobility, that mortality finally catches up with her.

* * *

In hindsight, it’s somewhat clear that she hadn’t truly accepted her death, or at least if she had, she hadn’t _fully_. It’s also relatively clear that, to a point, she was suicidal, or at least abstractly. She’s pretty sure she would never hurt herself, or commit suicide willingly, she doesn’t really have the backbone for it, but... if the option had given itself, her life for another, or maybe just death chasing at her heels, staring her down like a car hurtling towards her, she might’ve willingly died.

She’s cried plenty before in her life. Emma has made her cry, her mother’s death has made her cry, she’s cried over Disney films and plays and old books she thought lost. She’s cried over stupid things and very important things, but at least until that point, until the shakes became bad enough that getting down the stairs was actively risking her health, she hadn’t really cried about this. Which, really, was kinda odd; she’d cried in response to petty, school-yard insults spat viciously by ex-friends, why not her own death?

Maybe she just didn’t think it was important enough.

But after nearly ripping a page out of the Hobbit, fingers shaky, looking for any form of comfort in a world that was wildly getting out of her control, removing her agency, the tears started. She imagines they had been built up for a while, brimming in her chest, a lump she refused to acknowledge, but when they came they didn’t really stop. She didn’t want to die, not really, nobody does, but she was going to, her life was proof of it. Every day her father looked more drained, more apathetic, every day was harder to live in, harder to _cope with_.

She had months, _maybe_ , until they’d have to bury her.

The sobs are loud, but nobody is home to hear them, thankfully. For all that she’s dying and her body is a weak, shaky thing, she doesn’t really want anyone to hear her. These are for her, in a way, not for her father or his friends or distant cousins; these are for _her_ , this is her funeral dirge, babbled out through trembling lips as she tries to stopper the tears, tries to gain control over herself to little avail.

* * *

Emma visits her in her last month.

They had to move her to the hospital after she fell a few more times doing even basic motions. The shakes, thankfully, were subsided by some cocktail of drugs they’d likely give nobody else but a dying girl, but they’ve also limited her movement. Her body is perpetually weak, and her brain is foggy, clouded up and high, pleasantly distant from reality once again.

Her room is set up with a television and a laptop, the television bolted to a wall and left mostly muted. She plays audiobooks over her laptop, listens to them while she naps in-between moments of higher lucidity. It’s hard to be awake a lot anymore, her body is actively failing her now, she has to eat liquid food because everything else is violently rejected.

Emma’s there, during one of her better moments. She looks like she’s staring at a ghost, her face is pale, wan and thin, ginger hair pulled back into a tangly knot. The door to her room is open, but she hasn’t entered, she just lingers on the threshold, thin, beautiful fingers shaking against the metal of the knob, like she’s deciding whether or not to face down her deepest nightmares.

Maybe she is.

Emma swallows thickly and straightens her spine. With a careful step forward, she passes through, from the hallway to the interior, an intentional act. Her face is uncomfortably unhidden, there’s no hiding the mix of guilt-fear-self-loathing-pity-horror-depression that flickers on and off, swarming over her face only to be replaced by something new. Emma licks chapped lips, fingers lacing together nervously, taking in deep breaths, trying to center herself.

“Hey, Taylor.”

Taylor doesn’t smile, she isn’t quite capable of it, the muscles in her face were especially numbed and left lax, but she does try. Emma looks sick, and for a moment there’s vindication, there’s _hate_ bundled away in her chest before, like all the other things she’s had to work through, had to think through on her own, it sputters and dies. There’s no point, she’s on borrowed time.

“Hey, Ems.”

If Emma is caught off-guard by the nickname, she doesn’t show it.

“I, uhm.” Emma falters, twists, her eyes hood and there’s a wetness to them, one she can't hide. Her shoulders shake, her fingers come together, tense. Something in her is broken, Taylor realizes belatedly, unthinkingly; it’s hard to imagine Emma being anything but perfectly put together, but at least now it’s more than clear. That brokenness shines through, cuts like edged glass, there’s a hole where her friend used to be, and she wonders, perhaps, if Emma is due to follow after her.

Instead of letting her finish, Taylor lets out a croaking breath. Emma falters, again, glancing up in worry, needy worry, the sort of desperate ‘please-don’t-die’ that she never expected to see again. It almost knocks a laugh out of her; Emma, the horror of her life, broken down by the weight of mortality.

“C’mere,” Taylor says unthinkingly, lets the animal hindbrain do the talking, the emotional reconnection - though it’s far too late, bitterly so - that such a thing necessitates. “Sit down at the end of my bed, let’s talk.”

* * *

Panacea - Amy Dallon - doesn’t do brains. This is a constant, and Taylor has no expectation otherwise. It’s likely she can’t - if PHO is to be believed, or if the screen reader she had to install wasn’t lying to her - due to something called a ‘manton limit’, the same thing that prevents, say, Clockblocker from freezing the air he touches, for example.

But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t meet a cape, by the end of it.

In the end, when the Make a Wish Foundation comes to her, overburdened and unsure how to handle a 15-year-old versus their normal preteen faire, she asks for something simple, something that makes the agent relax. She asks to meet Armsmaster.

Oh, _Armsmaster_. What a sordid tale that was. During her childhood, Armsmaster was only starting to get off the ground, starting to distinguish himself from the other Tinkers on the scene. She was _obsessed_ with him, unhealthily so, she even managed to convince her mother to buy her boy’s boxers with his face on them from some shifty off-brand store downtown. She had a few figures of his, she knew a lot of his early quotes, she knew his fights, she was a bonafide fangirl, the sort usually reserved for famous musicians or actors.

Armsmaster is not who she thought he was a kid, but that’s to be expected, it’s even rather pleasant. Never meet your heroes is a relatively smart idea, better off not risking it, but as he passes into the room, one of the other Protectorate heroes waiting just outside of the door, her father off getting coffee, Taylor can’t help but smile. The smile he returns is robotic, uncomfortable, and makes her go wider.

“You probably aren’t fond of this, are you?” she finds herself asking after sitting in silence for a minute, nearly startling the man. He looks back at her quizzically but not harshly.

“No,” he admits. “I’m not used to it either.”

Taylor feels something hot and warm in her chest, a flush of sorts. Maybe happiness, so raw and free, it burns, or maybe it’s just something else in her body starting to die, she isn’t sure, doesn’t really care much either. “I was really into you as a kid,” she explains, her voice is hoarse, so hoarse, so shaky. She stutters, she mumbles, she can barely speak, her bottom lip is perpetually numb and it has been _days_ since she felt comfortable in her own body. “Ridiculously so, I even have boxers with your face on it. I probably still have one of your early figures laying around, and I can recount your first ever major villain fight by heart.”

There’s only silence in response to her babbling.

“I... I’m not sure why I asked for you,” she admits. “I could’ve gone for anything, anyone, but, well, maybe I knew more about you as a kid than I thought, because I’d hoped you would be human, that you wouldn’t treat this like I’d be getting better, because I’m not, you know? I’m dying, quicker now than ever. I’ll be lucky to last the next three weeks, I’m at the end of my rope.”

More silence, it doesn’t daunt her.

“I’m glad I was right,” she manages, after stumbling over the ‘I’m’ close to five separate times, her brain a scratched record, hitching and repeating unthinkingly.

Armsmaster looks at her, truly does. He looks at her long, curly, messy hair, he looks at her stick-thin limbs, her gaunt face, the way her eyes aren’t exactly aligned anymore, the way that her body twitches every once and a while. He looks, he looks and he looks, and for once, for once in her life, she does not come up wanting.

With a breath, a quiet, shallow breath that is too thin for a man who was - _is_ \- her hero, Armsmaster begins to quietly tell her what he does in a day, and what he’s been working on, like he’s reading the damn thing from a book, from a sectioned report he wrote the day before.

Taylor loves it.

* * *

In the end, her death isn’t soft, slipping off to sleep and never waking up again. She spends days slipping in and out of consciousness, never lucid. It all feels somewhat like a dream to her, not quite soft or gentle or ‘fluffy’ but... dreamlike, fey.

Her father cries for her, she hears that much. He cries and he cries and he cries and she wishes, painfully wishes, that she could help him, reassure him. Emma does too, but in her own way, she curls up at the end of the bed sometime deep into the night, dragging Taylor out just for long enough to stare at the dark, dark window, and sniffles little sobs into the fabric around her too-bony ankles. She isn’t sure how she got in, but the next time she gains any semblance of awareness she’s gone, leaving behind only some dampness near the heel of her right foot.

There’s no rush of memories, no ‘seeing your life flash behind your eyes’ at the moment of death. Really, she barely notices when her body finally gives the last shuddering jolt and the cascade of biological failure sweeps her away. She’s dreaming, at that moment, fitfully perhaps, but dreaming.

Taylor dreams, and dreams, and dreams. She dreams of her mother, soft hugs that were half-forgotten. She dreams of her grandparents, barely remembered but still looking at her with fond eyes. She dreams of her father, her poor father, clutching at her, wailing in terror about losing something else. She dreams of him putting his life back together, finding something new, but doesn’t feel bitter for it.

She dreams about Emma, about Sophia and Madison and the entire damn school. In a few of those dreams, she burns Winslow to the ground. She dreams of Armsmaster and his first fight against a dopey-looking cape by the name of Redhoof, a guy who could explode parts of his body and then reshape them into a monstrous form.

She dreams of a lot, in those moments between living and dying.

In the end, she doesn’t wake up.


	2. Monday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma is made out of beautiful pieces; polished, perfect, but nevertheless in pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for suicidal thoughts, lots of self-harm, self-hatred, and just, tons of grief.

Taylor’s funeral is small, quiet, and bright. It’s the beginning of summer, flowers bloom in bunches around old graves, the rocky pathway from the cementary’s entrance to the little alcove where they’re going to put her to rest is peaceful, gentle. 

Emma stares at her own hands, watches them shake. She looks at her dress, long and black, and remembers that she didn’t put it on herself, didn’t choose it. For the first time in years her mother had to dress her and put her make-up on, her own body refusing to act on her demands, refusing to believe that she could be dead, that Taylor is to be buried and with her part of Emma too. 

She has no tears, can’t find it in herself to shed them, but there’s something worse in her, something like broken glass at upturned angles, waiting for just the right moment to stab and  _ stab _ and  _ stab _ , all to carve out pieces of her. In this moment, she knows she is weak, wrong, broken. 

The warbling sob of Danny, of  _ Uncle Dan _ , cuts across the air like a broken dirge as they all - her, her mother, family friends, people she doesn’t know or have the energy to care about - watch Taylor’s casket dip beneath the surface of the earth, laid to rest at the base of a headstone they put right beside Aunt Annette’s. 

* * *

But, then, this is wrong, isn’t it? It’s not the full story, there’s no context there. At this moment she is mourning but she  _ isn’t quite there either _ , is she? Her head is elsewhere, riding the currents, distant and unable to think, unable to cope.

No, no. The funeral isn’t right, it’s too far ahead.

She needs to think back further.

* * *

The day Taylor is absent to school is, of all things, a boring Thursday. It’s not unusual, either, Taylor has something of a habit of skipping later into the week, when their taunts and jabs have built up enough to weigh her down, to break her a little more. 

Yet, for all that it’s a boring Thursday, her absence is felt. It shouldn’t be, Emma knows, Taylor being absent shouldn’t distract her from her work or from the shared smiles with Madison, but it does. All she can think of is the week before, the stumbles Taylor had, the way she looks thinner than she did a month ago, that one time Sophia barely nudged her and Taylor toppled like a house of cards. They had laughed about it, in the moment, but something about it doesn’t sit well, burns in her throat,  _ makes her worry _ . 

* * *

No, too early.

* * *

The wrongness has been persistent for the following week, from Friday to the next. There is something in the air, pungent and odorous, shackling people. The way that Ms. Stone walks in through the door, takes her place at the front of the class when she is little more than the vice principal, it makes her anxious, wary. 

The woman looks brittle, sharp-edged, like she isn’t quite there. Homeroom goes quiet, knows better than to tempt fate around Ms. Stone, but she still says nothing, still stands there with quiet, gentle breaths like she’s trying very hard not to be emotional. She stands, and she stands, and she says nothing, until, finally:

“Taylor will not be returning to school,” the words are spoken flatly but not harshly, intentionally repressed. Emma’s shoulders tense, something in her  _ rankles _ , hairs stand on end as the wrongness settles into her bone, her marrow.

The class doesn’t understand, they titter. There’s even some giggling, but a sharp crack of Ms. Stone’s hand against a desk, her face bordering on a rictus of rage, of  _ anger _ , shuts everyone up, even the more oppositional kids who get off on upsetting teachers. 

“She has been diagnosed with cancer,” Ms. Stone explains, and Emma, not for the first time, wonders just how illegal this is, and if a single teacher on the planet paid Taylor any more attention than her father did, wonders if they know she has no friends, not at Winslow anyway. “She doesn’t have long left to live, it would appear, and she wants to get her things in order, have time to reconcile with her family. I’m aware not all of you have been affected by cancer, but some of us have, and the proper amount of respect will be taken. Are we clear?”

Emma’s world is falling out from under her.

“Good. Now, we have a contact number...”

Nothing makes sense.

* * *

But that isn’t quite it either, is it?

* * *

Emma swings, hits, and Sophia crumples back, holding her face. 

There’s silence between the two of them, a broken promise, a companionship cracked.

Something in Emma  _ breaks _ . 

“Shut up!” she screams, voice loud and harsh through the emptiness of her house. Dad is with Danny, Zoe is with Taylor, Anne is out-of-state, off doing whatever she does, free as a bird. “Shut up  _ shut up shut the fuck up! _ ” 

Sophia just looks at her, hand touching against her bloodied lower lip, eyes empty and almost understanding. 

Emma clasps hands to her ears, digs her nails in until hot warmth burbles and spills between the press of flesh, runs down the back of her neck, puddles in the gap near her ear. She screams incoherently, something inside of her is rotten, broken and sharp and  _ jagged and so fucking guilty _ . She can barely breathe, can barely think, every time she closes her eyes she sees Taylor, weak,  _ pathetic _ Taylor, swaddled in too-many blankets, eyes looking at her with complete forgiveness, bone-thin and pale-faced and looking closer to dead than alive. 

She has nightmares, she can’t sleep, the world rips at her, hooks digging into flesh, drags her under and whispers terrifying things in her ear. Taylor is  _ dying _ , she is dead in everything but name and Emma is so fucking  _ tired _ , so weak, so pathetic. She has a strong body, her father tested the entire family after Taylor’s diagnosis, she is everything Taylor isn’t, every piece of her pretty and durable and  _ polished _ . 

Yet, she is still broken.

* * *

Closer.

* * *

She visits without Taylor knowing, mostly for her own sanity. Emma is certain that if she’s forced to face Taylor again, forced to look at and listen to a dying girl whisper about how she’s enjoyed catching back up on books, on literature she abandoned since Aunt Annette’s death, she’ll wither up and die. So she visits when Taylor isn’t lucid, when she naps to the sound of audiobooks, soothing voice actors depicting beautiful sights, things Taylor will never see, never touch, never feel. 

She steals these moments, a mix of her own penance and her own way of going through the mourning process. They’re small, she never stays for longer than 30 minutes, can’t risk being under Taylor’s stare, and most of them she cries, however quietly, after she’s done, knees to her face, crouching to the left of the hospital’s back entrance and trying very hard not to leave claw marks in her skin, around her wrists where the guilt buzzes like a bone-deep itch. 

Piece by piece, moment by moment, she learns to hate herself. Emma knows she already did to a certain extent, modelling does that to young girls and her father had been putting her on stage since she was four, too-innocent to know the truth of things, but now it’s almost crystalized. Before, self-hatred was a sense of discontent, of something slimy and slick in her body, ever-present but mostly ignorable.

Now? 

Now the hatred burns, cooks like angry embers, makes every patch of skin another canvas for nails and teeth.  _ Anything, anything at all _ , the hatred pleads,  _ anything to be free of the cage she’s made for herself _ .

* * *

So close.

* * *

Reconciling with Sophia is easy, and not because she manipulates her. Oh, Emma could, she knows her way around Sophia’s language, her words, her thoughts and malcontent, but she’s too tired lately, her body is empty and so is her mind. Her sleeves are long, even in the later end of Spring, and while Sophia’s eyes narrow, stare at where she’s hiding the claw-marks, she says nothing.

It’s almost uncomfortable how easy it is for Sophia to break into the hospital without anyone noticing. They avoid the active cameras, swoop under the broken ones, they walk long hallways with closed doors, count the numbers on each one, listen to the heady beep-beep-beep of medical machinery and smell the scent of death buried beneath antiseptic. 

Taylor’s room is empty for all but her, her laptop, and her television. She has days, Alan had said to the family, face tight with emotion and tears, maybe less, maybe more, but there’s no hiding it, Taylor is going to be gone, and gone very soon.

Sophia waits for her outside the door, whether to keep a lookout or just so she doesn’t have to look at the thing which haunts her, well, who knows. 

Three in the morning is hardly a good time for last goodbyes, but Emma still can’t help herself. She knows she’s likely jostling Taylor, runs the risk of being a victim of her stare, of her _ forgiveness _ , but she still climbs onto the too-creaky bed, curls up like a broken, dying thing at the foot of it, and cries. She cries, burying the noises in her chest as she gulps for air and leaves wet marks around Taylor’s ankles, trying to ignore the sensation that something is dying in her, that she’s withering up, that she’s losing something so much more important than anyone could have ever imagined. 

It’s hard. The world is hard. Everything is heavy and  _ fatigued _ now, Dad’s been pushing for therapy, for everyone, but especially for her. She doesn’t get along with Anne on a good day, but even her bitch of a sister, the one who ran away, the golden child, spent a few hours in her room a day ago, hugging her and telling her that she’ll be here, that she’s moving back home, coming to act as her scaffolding again, to keep her stable.

Emma doesn’t - won’t - believe her.

She’s already broken, after all.

* * *

The pieces are back in place, a full picture built.

* * *

Emma stares at the headstone, stares at the disrupted earth, wonders how long her fingers would last if she starts to dig, starts to pull earth away from the casket. She feels like her heart’s down there, somehow, deep beneath the earth. 

She turns, stares emptily at Sophia, who herself is waiting, staring off along the hills, the rows of grave-after-grave. It’s quiet, dark, they snuck out again. It’s been a few days since the funeral, still hasn’t felt like it settled in yet. There’s something long-broken in her chest, made wider by the death, made worse. If those feelings were physical, no doubt she’d be bleeding everywhere, marking the world for all to see.  _ Come _ , the hole would say,  _ look at the broken girl _ .

“I’m tired,” she says, her voice raspy, thick from weeks of disuse. Sophia turns to her, eyes heavy, the bags beneath each easily found even beneath a layer of concealer and the warm brown of her skin, and just nods. They’re both tired, she figures, tired and lost and drifting. 

* * *

She feels like Dorian Grey, the picture of her guilt built from the fragments of who she once was, the only thing that keeps her even marginally tethered to life nowadays.

* * *

She quits modelling, can’t stand it anymore. 

Her father argues with her about it, and she screams at him. She screams and she  _ screams _ and she  _ screams _ until her voice is hoarse and at some point her father rolls up her sleeves, catches the grooves on her arms, half-bloodied and scabbed.

She goes to therapy. She has no say in the matter.

It helps as much as it doesn’t, somehow. 

* * *

If she let go of that grief, where would she find penance? What would be left for her?

* * *

Mrs. Glynda is a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a warm smile. She is a woman who deals primarily in trauma counselling for teenagers, and she’s about the best you can buy in Brockton. She’s expensive, yes, but money isn’t an issue. 

This is her fourth visit in the span of two weeks. They have quiet conversations, moments that Mrs. Glynda manages to coax out of her by offering up her own stories, her own experiences. It’s small improvements, small measures, ways to prevent self-harm, red pens to drive away the itch.

It’s a Monday, tired and bleak, when Emma finally can’t quite keep privacy to herself, can’t stop talking once the words start. She exposes her chest, she reveals her heart, blackened and rotten, she goes through the list of things she did to Taylor during her bullying, she talks about every secret she’s portioned out, every bit of trust she’s broken. She talks about the self-hatred, she talks about the death, she talks about punching her friend and she talks about the hollowness she feels, the way she’s adrift. 

Mrs. Glynda does not spite her, does not hate her, does not  _ condemn her _ . What she does is worse. 

She comforts her. 

* * *

Emma was always breaking, but it was delayed, slowed. It started with the ABB, holding her down, threatening this or that, only saved when she fought back. The shattering was slow, piece-by-piece, widening as each day went by, each nightmare of grasping hands and laughter jolted her awake. The spiderwebs grew, widened, came to encompass her entire self, only stopped from breaking by the power, the  _ authority _ , she could find by ripping it out of people who trusted her, who loved her.

After so many years, so many stolen moments, she finally shatters. She is no longer a person with a hole, but just a bunch of discarded pieces, pretty, polished,  _ beautiful _ , but broken. 

They put her back together, no matter how much she screams at them not to. 

Each time she breaks, hands are there to put her back together. She is fragile, she is weak, she is held together by the energy she soaks on good days but falls to pieces on her bad ones.

Nevertheless, they put her back together.

Eventually, maybe, they won’t need to.

But for now, they do.


	3. Tuesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sophia knows, perhaps too well, that she will die before she becomes an adult.
> 
> All that matters is that she dies fighting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for some like, depressive mentality (not perceiving that they'll live to adulthood), self-hatred, references to childhood sexual harassment (and possible abuse) and one scene where a woman is nearly sexually assaulted.

Emma hits her, sends her to the floor. Her world spins for a moment, knocked off-center as her brain bounces unpleasantly in her skull. Her face aches, and the slip of tongue she runs along her lower lip - to the visceral complaint of her own jaw - makes it clear she’s bleeding, though from Emma’s knuckles or her own teeth, she isn’t sure. 

Sophia stumbles to her feet, pushes down on the betrayal twisting in her chest. Emma is on the ground, hunched over, nails in the skin around her temples, screaming like a broken thing. She sounds like her littlest brother, too-neglected, banging his head against the wall because the nannies at the childcare place ignored him in favour of the white kids; because he was left alone and without interaction during a period in his life that he needed it, where talking and touching a child helps organize their brains.

A broken thing, misbegotten by life, twisted up into angry knots and unsure how to fully deal with herself. That’s what Emma was always, sure, but never this far, never this extreme. Part of her wants to hit her back, force-for-force, as it was, but the other part doesn’t. It sits, quiet, and watches as Emma dissolves into tiny, breathless sobs, as screaming transitions to a panic attack.

This, at least, is something she knows how to handle, how to cope with.

The ache in her chest still refuses to leave.

* * *

Sophia doesn’t have plans for anything past her sixteenth birthday, just like she had no plans for anything past her fifteenth a year before that, fourteenth a year before that, and so on. She never has plans, she does not count the years past her life and expect to have a future as an adult.

She knows, perhaps too well, that she will die for her own beliefs. Whether she’ll die in a costume or in her civvies or in neither, it doesn’t really matter. 

All that does, really, is that she dies  _ fighting _ . Kicking, screaming, clawing, punching, kicking, shooting, attacking.

She will not go quietly. 

* * *

While plenty of people would like to claim otherwise, guilt is not a foreign concept to Sophia. She has felt guilty plenty of times, has been burdened by her choices, by the two dead people she put fletching in. She still dreams about them, hands reaching up, dragging her down, her body unresponsive, unwilling to fight back, taking their abuse with silent acceptance.

No, Sophia has  _ felt _ guilt. She has breathed it, she has cried it, and it has been weaponized against her, held like a knife, jammed into her very being. It was the thing that unravelled her, that made her who she was, so she’s learned to compartmentalize it, to push it to the fringes, to not  _ accept _ it, but to rather acknowledge its existence but otherwise bury it under a mindset that would make even the taskmasters they call her handlers blush. 

Hebert both is and isn’t the exception. Staring at her sleeping form, having slipped in through the wall using her power silently in the middle of the night, Sophia can feel nothing but the weight of guilt, and yet she knows rationally none of this is really her fault. The weak thing didn’t get cancer because of her, she played no part in her mortality,  _ she is not responsible for it _ . 

Yet.

Sucking in a breath, one too loud if the way Hebert stirs, murmurs disconnectedly as the lump in her skull makes another series of violent spasms run along her legs, kicks lashing out without her consent, Sophia shuts herself down. She bundles up the guilt, the pity, the sympathy, and leaves.

* * *

Sophia thinks, abstractly, that she has been born three separate times. She was first born screaming, pushed out of her mother in the back of her father’s van, an older, predatory man who wanted nothing to do with either of them, promised them money under the table to carve him out of the family and stopped giving said money after Sophia turned three.

The second time she was born was when she triggered, screaming in her own head, body refusing to move, mouth refusing to open, when her mother’s boyfriend cornered her, whispering unpleasantly in her ear about how little space he’ll give her, now that they’re a  _ beautiful family _ , how he’s removed the locks on her bedroom door, how he intends to help her ‘study’ when nobody’s looking, how all the guilt she felt for her negativity towards him was  _ fabricated _ , parcelled out to her family, used as a way to weigh her down, to keep her in place.

The third time she was born was at fifteen, when she watched, harrowed and on-edge, as Hebert screams out in pain during one of her fits in the middle of the night, agony ripping through her voice, eyes opening unaware, unblinking, pupils dilated and nose leaking red down her chin. 

She never goes back to see Hebert without Emma, after that. 

* * *

Guilt hounds her like a starving dog after the incident with Hebert. It’s unending, nipping at her ankles, forever unfed and constantly at the front of her mind, making ignorance impossible. It gnaws at her, makes her go along with Emma’s pity, makes her go back to the hospital at the dead of night, with or without Emma, just to watch the front of Hebert’s hospital door, just to be sure that everything’s okay. She puts herself at risk, stays up late, all to stave off the guilt, placates it by mentally justifying what she’s doing with the excuse that she’s  _ guarding _ Hebert, for whatever reason. 

When she sleeps, she dreams of the dead and the soon-to-be. Beneath her, in the deep void below, Hebert beckons her with outstretched arms that don’t quite reach, skin pale for all but the raised, inflamed red of her chest, the growth pulsing like an erratic heartbeat, filling her ears with the unsteady  _ thud-thud-thudthud _ of something wrong, something twisted and unpleasant. She goes to sleep late and wakes early, all with Hebert on her mind, the guilt she had dismissed starving away in the pit of her skull, drooling, so hungry and so ready for Hebert to die so it has something to fully attach itself to, something to weigh her down with. 

Her life is unstable, she is barely sleeping, Piggot yells at her, people ignore her, dismiss her. Her world narrows down to a point as the months slide by between her fingers, death rapidly approaching like an oncoming train: unavoidable and loud. She covers the bags beneath her eyes with concealer and the natural flush of her skin, she watches Emma do the same, their relationship on the ropes but not quite fully lost. 

* * *

She’s floating - weightless, empty,  _ free from everything _ \- over the gaps between two buildings when she sees it: curly black hair being pressed into the concrete, two men wearing heavy outerwear, even in the early portions of spring, hands outstretched, holding her down, pulling at a floral blouse in harsh jerks, ripping it. The woman is screaming, loud and high, Sophia’s focus narrowing down to a point, nightmares flashing in the back of her eyes, the world tuning out for all but the thing below her.

Something in her snaps, breaks, shatters like glass, and before she can really tell what she’s doing she’s dropping from the air, weapon firing, an unthinkable scream on her lips as the ground leaps up to greet her.

* * *

Piggot spends what feels like hours screaming at her. She’s hurt two people beyond what’s acceptable, she’s on her last fuck-up, she’s only saved because of the fact that she saved someone. Nothing new, nothing old, Piggot yells and bellows and postures like the fat cow she is, and none of it sinks in. Sophia stares at her hands, the blood-stained gloves, adrenaline vibrating in her bones. The woman wasn’t even Hebert,  _ the woman wasn’t even Hebert _ . 

She refocuses what feels like hours later when Amy Dallon looks at her with dead, dead eyes and asks permission to heal her. She agrees, and the pain in her leg, the fracture in her ankle, rapidly fades away, heals over. The girl is gone seconds later, back into the expanse of the hospital, followed by her mother, who glances back at Sophia like she has more to say but never quite manages the courage to do so. 

Minutes - maybe hours? She’s still not sure - later, the woman herself comes to thank her. Sophia’s still in costume, even at the hospital, and really now looking at her the woman looks nothing like Hebert, nothing like the shrivelled up thing that’s dying a wing over. She’s not very tall, she’s got sharp eyes - monolid, with big, black irises that seem to suck in the light around her - olive skin and a curvy body. The only thing that truly connects her to Hebert is the hair, which has been pulled back into a tail, making her look even less familiar. 

Sophia doesn’t chew her out, doesn’t say anything, and lets the woman babble her piece and leave. 

Dean arrives shortly after, tries to talk to her, and she shuts him out. He can take his armchair psychology and rot with it, she thinks, and he apparently reads that much from her before deciding to leave, his parting shot of “you can talk to me whenever you need to” the only thing she really absorbs that day, the hours bleeding too much into one-another for any one moment to be coherent.

* * *

The nightmares recycle themselves. 

She’s an outside observer now, watching as dead men pull a dying girl under, mirroring that day, pulling at her clothes, revealing the tumor that has swelled, swallowed the majority of her torso, leaving inflamed flesh and the deafening drum of an unsteady heartbeat in her ears. 

* * *

Sophia isn’t there for the funeral, she’s not invited, but she can’t really keep herself away. She’s waiting a field over, watching a handful of people and Hebert’s father huddle around a lowering coffin on a beautiful sunny day, the air hot and restrictive for the first time that year. She’s wearing normal colors, reds and greens, doesn’t think she deserves to wear black, and all but feels the guilt begin to sink teeth into her, begin to weigh her down. 

She’s tired, more than ever, especially now that she doesn’t have an excuse to stay up at night to avoid the nightmares. They’re pungent, crystal-clear, a broken record of watching Taylor be dragged into the void by featureless hands, or watching Taylor herself, pale hands and empty-chested, the tumor gone, leaving only a hole, telling her to remain still, that she’s ill, while she drags her beneath the inky-black waters. 

The two men she killed, who maybe have a right to be in her dreams, in a twisted, roundabout way, never make a return. She almost forgets about them, though never entirely.

* * *

Emma looks dead on her feet, standing in front of Taylor’s grave. It’s a quaint thing, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother’s grave, a simple headstone that reads: 

_ Taylor Anne Hebert _

_ 1995—2011 _

_ Taken too early, forever loved. _

She almost feels wrong being here, almost feels like she should be punished for standing too close, but she knows that’s the guilt, the weight on her shoulders, so she ignores it. Emma stares at her, hollow-eyed and empty, thin-boned and wary, too much so.

“I’m tired,” Emma croaks. 

Sophia is too.

Emma huddles into herself, fingers tensing against long-sleeved arms, pulling on the cloth just enough to show the marks, the scars that had started to bunch up along pale-white skin. “I hate myself,” she continues. 

Sophia does too. 

“I hate that I feel bad for her,” Emma whispers, her legs nearly give out but Sophia’s there, stopping the fall before it can happen. Emma doesn’t even look at her, just stares vacantly at the headstone, like she’s planning where hers will go. “I hate that I miss her.”

Sophia does too.

* * *

In the end, Emma is caught with scarred wrists. Sophia texts her, spends time with her, over the weeks of limbo as Emma goes to therapy, as people start trying to find a space to put her. They don’t grow distant, they keep in contact, but the intimacy is lost as therapy becomes more frequent and Emma is forced to stay home more often.

Sophia isn’t really sure what to do with herself, what to do with the rest of the year as time slips by. She passes school, of course she does, she’s not stupid or dim, and she keeps up with track meetings but there’s an energy that lapses, that sluggishly bleeds out of her. She stops going out on personal patrols, they might’ve caught her one day anyways, and keeps to the Wards. Missy, brat though she is, tries to warm up to her, and in a moment of weakness -  _ something she isn’t, something she can’t be _ \- Sophia lets her. 

Nothing deep comes out of it, but some sort of tension she’d never noticed finally abates, finally leaves. Nobody comments on it, but everyone - with maybe herself as an exception - is grateful for its absence. 

* * *

It’s slow, but gradually the nightmares pull away. It takes months, maybe longer, and she still gets them when she probably shouldn’t, but they are mostly gone. The hurt, the emptiness, it pulls away too, but the guilt doesn’t quite manage to leave her. It lingers like a noise, like a song holding one note for too long, aborted before it could end. 

She doesn’t let the guilt consume her, but she knows better than to say it doesn’t influence her. She’s not sure why, exactly, but she manages to somehow use it as encouragement. She runs herself ragged on bad days, the days when the guilt soaks up everything, when she  _ deserves nothing and nobody _ , when the starving dog hounds her, and on the good days she lets herself rest, lets herself coast and do things right without the manic drive pushing her forward. It’s not an equilibrium, too unstable, but it’s something at least, it’s better than being adrift. 

She reconnects with Emma months later, sitting in the grassy shade of a tree, staring at Taylor’s grave on the anniversary of her death, trying to think. Emma just sits down beside her, unasked, while the rest of the Barnes and Taylor’s father pass her by, Alan looking at her curiously, but not too deeply. They’re carrying flowers to the pair of graves, and though nobody is smiling, nobody is the shattered wreck that they had been all that time ago. 

In the shade of a tree, on a Tuesday that would be boring in any other circumstance, Sophia lets herself be okay, even if only for a little while.


	4. Wednesday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Colin knows people do not like him, that he is weird and off-putting, that he focuses too much and deals too little with his own emotions.
> 
> He never thought it would matter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for mentions of childhood abuse, a lot of ... struggles? I suppose? with a neurodivergent person having difficulties fitting in and dealing with bullying, alongside general warnings for grief. also there are some very minor Ward spoilers about dauntless' life prior to joining the protectorate.

People do not like him, that much he is aware of. Colin knows, personally, that he is weird; there has never been a moment in his life where Colin has been neurotypical, and he has never been good at hiding that much. He is both too driven and not, he is both too emotional and not, he is greedy and yet he refuses to be materialistic. He is an enigma, he is everything everyone doesn’t want, and yet he is perfectly suited for everything they need him to do.

The value of a person is relative, in the end. For all that he grew up bullied and disliked for his oddness, he was still a perfect student. Not prodigal, or a genius, but perfect to the limits of his ability, and so people liked to pair off with him in school. For all that his father did not like him, did not like that he couldn’t be the boy he thought of when children were first discussed, years ago, he is also the only person who cleans, who keeps things working. It doesn’t stop his father from using the belt, admittedly, but it does stop the vitriol before it can worsen. 

Predictably, for all that he is good, that he is driven and _focused_ and capable, everything comes crashing down on his head during college.

* * *

Colin is not a social climber, but it would be a lie to say he isn’t climbing the ladder in the Protectorate. He is alive and active during the periods where the Protectorate is little more than a strike force that calls in local heroes for large threats when necessary. He might not have been there, been a part of the original Wards and Protectorate team, but he is still one of the original, one of the most recognized, just below Alexandria, Hero, Legend and Eidolon. 

In the end, it hardly matters. He is from Brockton Bay, a city he never wanted to return to, and nevertheless they force him back. He’s given the leadership position of the Protectorate and oversight over the burgeoning Wards team when it’s put together years later. He outlives three separate PRT directors, and _yet_ , and yet...

It does not matter.

* * *

Dauntless - Shawn - is an enigma. Maybe it’s because Colin isn’t neurotypical, maybe it’s because he’s a Tinker and the ever-present rush of information and blueprints and _ideas_ and the drive to study is, admittedly, a little overwhelming. Maybe it’s a mix of the two, but nevertheless, the logic Shawn works under makes no sense. Shawn has had his powers for ten years prior to joining the Protectorate, apparently got them when trying to save his significant other’s life and the child she was carrying, and he’s done nothing with them.

There’s always been capes who worked on a scale of how much they tended to go out, how violent they were. Some are extreme, mostly villains, impulse control, personal issues, and a pressure to do things pushing them into a snowball situation that gets out of hand. Tinkers were a lot like this, cycling through building and needing new resources which, in the wrong circumstances, could rapidly get out of control. There were others who were calmer, better at handling their issues, who could go without a patrol per day, but they still had _some_ level of drive.

Shawn, by contrast, has none. He had his powers for ten years and did precisely nothing with them outside of using up charges when they got ‘too thick’. He wasn’t even recruited because he finally did reach his breaking point moment and turned vigilante, no, he was recruited because, of all things, one of Colin’s newer creations picked up the absolute excess of energy that filled his house, partially-enhanced objects sitting around. He joined because _it would be a pain not to_ , and that it promised consistent income to ensure his child got a good life, not for any other reason.

It’s not even his power, either, though Colin would be the first to admit he wasn’t fond of it. Tinkers existed like Shawn, maybe not as directly, ones Colin had coined the term ‘deviant Tinkers’ for. Tinkers who didn’t _really_ Tinker, never studied or innovated, but fashioned machines which did it for them. One example, All-in-One, was a member of the Elite and could only personally make one thing himself: a terminal-shaped box that he inserted into the ground and that pumped out random tinkertech creations every day or so, with no real rhyme or reason to it. Tinkers who functioned like Shawn, hands-off, _existed_ , and though they were often a bit unfair, he is more than used to coping with feelings of jealousy. 

No, it was that Shawn wasn’t driven, he was nothing but Shawn, laughable, happy. He did things without _needing_ to, he charmed people, he was everything Colin wasn’t, unabused, normal, neurotypical and perfectly acceptable company. He got along with his peers far more than Colin, formed deeper relationships, understood interactivity, was everything and anything that the people in his life wanted Colin to be. 

For the first time, Colin learns to hate a person he has no real acquaintance with.

* * *

Dragon - Tess - is perhaps the one person he gets along with on any personal level. She is more socially adroit than him, yes, but somehow she understands him more than the half-dozen therapists he’s seen through his tenure in the Protectorate. She understands that he’s not fully clinical, just mostly, that there is a person beneath all of that, that who he is outwardly is not the full extent of who he is _personally_. 

He loves her, maybe not romantically, not in that way, but he loves her more than he ever did his family and coworkers. 

She is grounding, helpful, when he’s at his worst, and she’s a driving influence when he loses himself in too many projects, his brain unable to focus on any one without assistance. She is a conversationalist, she is a fellow Tinker, she _gets it_. 

She’s also there when he gets the phone call about Taylor Hebert.

* * *

Taylor Anne Hebert, 15, cancer patient with an estimated month and a half left to live. A dead mother and a father who is barely holding himself together, a girl who largely listens to audiobooks as she naps between lucid periods. She’s given herself over to death, she has shown no signs of needing to accept it, and yet she’s still asked for him.

Colin is not _new_ to the idea of children - which she still is, regardless of how teenagers might complain otherwise - asking to see heroes as their wish from the Make a Wish foundation. Tinkers in particular deal with it all the time, mostly from children who have been encouraged by their parents, hoping that maybe parahuman intervention will fix the issue. It’s not entirely fair for the girl herself, but that is genuinely what he expects when he first steps in, expects a girl begging him to fix her, to find a way to stop her death before it can begin.

She doesn’t, though.

Instead, he spends two hours with her, just to talk. She tells him about her childhood fascination in him, her hope that he wouldn’t treat her like she’s a day away from being fixed, that her death isn’t absolute, and he tells her about his day, recites his work report because he isn’t sure how else to rephrase it, and she loves it. He talks more with her than he does with some of his coworkers in months, he talks to her until, whether due to the drugs or the tumor pressing into her brain, she falls into unconsciousness.

Her father hugs him, nearly gets a gun pulled on him for doing it, but he does. 

For the first time, Colin isn’t really sure how to deal with that.

* * *

Taylor’s memory remains with him, largely against his will. There’s something about it, the total belief in him seen between misaligned eyes, one looking lazy, off-centered. There’s the image of her, swaddled in blankets as bony bits of her body stick out from beneath, too-thin, looking dead already. It’s the words she said, the delight she took in hearing him recite what to others might’ve seemed impersonal, disinterested.

The next time Shawn easily works his way through a conversation, following the tail end of reports that he’ll likely be elevated to a leadership position and moved across the country, where Colin is at the end of his rope, bone-tired all in an attempt to keep up, to keep being important, where he’s about to open his mouth and _shout_ , open it and be angry and rage-filled, Taylor’s image blinks across the back of his mind and something inside of him _gives_. Instead of yelling, instead of feeling sorry for himself, instead of getting frustrated that all of his work, his research, the sleepless nights he’s given over to a system that seems to care very little for him, he just breathes out. Deep, shaking breaths, in and out, and the rage, the anger, the irritation, the betrayal he’ll never admit to feeling, it all escapes, pushes out with each quiet heave of his breath. 

He is calm in the face of it, and that changes things.

* * *

The memory of Taylor continues to ground him, continues to calm him. It’s odd, he thinks, almost impersonal to cling to the memory of a dying girl as a coping mechanism, bordering on creepy, but he pushes those doubts away. The change, however small, feels larger from where he’s standing. A lot of his drive had been devoted to his anger, to his increasing frustration with the system, he had started to focus more on himself, less on others, had started pulling away from what few relationships he actually had with others.

People notice, of course. Colin is not subtle, and neither is his anger, they reconnect with him now that he’s out of his rut. Tinkers he knows, but who live further away, reopen conversation with him, get his opinions on work they’re doing. Tess is proud of him - and what a feeling _that_ is - and his coworkers are calmer, less tense around him. Whether or not Shawn notices, well, Colin finds that he doesn’t care. 

Maybe in part due to this shift, maybe in part due to the Tinker he had talked to recently who specializes in prediction, but he finds a drive behind his actions he hadn’t before. He changes things, instead of focusing the Endbringer prediction software entirely on the beings themselves, he folds in people, makes it so it takes into account the actions of others, makes it less specialized, but more capable of taking from a larger variety of data, makes it so that he can use it while others are present without risking cutting them to shreds as well. 

Things move on, and they get better.

* * *

He’s invited to Taylor’s funeral and he goes. Nobody knows him, everyone is caught up in their grief too much, but he still stands for the full duration of the funeral, still leaves behind a bouquet of bluebells, hydrangea, and cattails that Tess helps him put together after he explains the significance of the situation. 

He’s given a week off, not intentionally he expects, to grieve. He takes it, his first true break in the better part of a decade that wasn’t mandated by a doctor.

* * *

It’s a miserable, rainy Wednesday when Leviathan comes to shore. He listens to Legend say a speech, he convenes with other Tinkers, makes fallback points and contingency plans in the event that something goes horribly wrong. He explains the technology he has to bear, explains that he needs a good moment to swing in with others, to hopefully get more damage done on Leviathan than ever before. People remember him, know him, and trust him, and give him the go-ahead.

He does not set up villains to die, he does not break the truce.

He meets Leviathan with a dozen others, brings his project to the fore.

It’s not enough to kill the beast, but it drives him back with record low losses, for capes, civilians and the city as a whole.


	5. Friday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danny's life was taken apart in pieces.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning for suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, grief wrt losing a child, and depression.

Danny’s life falls apart in pieces. The first piece comes abruptly, unexpectedly, a dagger to the heart when he’s called at work to listen to the condolences of a doctor about his wife, who died on impact. The second piece comes more slowly, is carved out of him with a serrated dagger, as his daughter falls terminally ill, begins to wither like an unloved grape on a vine, starting first with puking, nosebleeds, unconsciousness and nausea, before being confirmed by a doctor with a voice that strongly resembled the one who told him his wife was dead.

_ It’s terminal, I’m so sorry _ .

* * *

No parent wants to outlive their children, it’s a tragedy to do so. Happy married couples should die together, of old age, surrounded by loving family, grandparents and close cousins, well-wishes as they pass on and into the next. 

Danny watches as his daughter dies over a period of months. It starts first with shakes, with frustration, then it’s the lapses of focus, the hours she forgets where she can’t recognize him and hides in her room. It’s the way she gradually stops getting up to move all that frequently, a grotesque stillness settling into her body that is broken up by spasms, violent jerks that she can’t control, like every few seconds someone is hitting a sensitive part of her body with a rubber hammer. 

He spends less time at work just to be sure he’s there for her, but he can do so little. Taylor is independent, and part of him knows she doesn’t want to be coddled into her death. She wants him to go on as normal, to act as her father, and ignore the spectre that grows more solid everyday, that settles around her shoulders, ready to tear her away from him too. He can’t, and perhaps that’s his failing, perhaps that’s his fault, his greatest sin as a parent, but he cannot simply let it go.

He can’t let  _ her _ go, and it rips him to shreds.

* * *

He doesn’t take to the bottle, and that’s his only saving grace as a parent. He is sober for every aching, bitter second of Taylor’s cancer. He finds outlets elsewhere, he punches things, screams into the empty parking lot of a nearby 7-11 in the middle of the night, he writes and he talks to other parents with terminally ill children, he learns to cherish what moments he has left with her even as they become more fleeting, as her lucid periods begin to shorten. 

He holds Taylor’s hand when she needs it, he pretends not to hear her cry when she can’t stand other people seeing her weak, he doesn’t quit work but he elevates someone to his position, asks them to take over for the most part. They do a good enough job, and he’s kept afloat by the health plan he fought hand-over-fist for and by still doing enough hours to reach full-time, even if it means that some of his friends pad the books a bit. Nobody looks too deeply at it, it’s a form of solidarity, of understanding, and they refuse to snitch on him because everyone understands what he’s going through. 

He cries a lot, but then he always did. He never lets Taylor see it, can’t, but he does.

He watches as his daughter begins to die, as she spends more time dozing, listening to books, than she does awake. She can barely stare straight anymore, she’s close to legally blind, she’s on her last ropes. The chest in his heart still beats, but it beats to a broken rhythm, it strangles him with each pump, with each cycle of blood through his system.

He considers suicide a few times, considers killing himself when Taylor is about to die, a day before, even admits it to Alan, but never does. He stays, remains aware, for every second of Taylor’s remaining life.

Then she dies, and he’s finally allowed to fall apart.

* * *

It’s a point of shame, but he barely remembers the funeral. He is sober for it, sure, but the emotions that run rabid through his system give it all a delusional edge, harsh and pliant. He cries, he sobs, he watches as his daughter is lowered far beneath the surface, just to the left of his wife, and wonders what he did in a past life to deserve this. To have such a wonderful life built up for him, to have everything, to love and live only for it all to be taken away like this, unexpected deaths, people he cares for taken far before their time. 

He drinks enough to kill himself, pukes it all out that very same night, and survives the days that follow the death of his last tether. He wants to die, but can’t bring himself to mix the cocktail of booze and leftover prescription medication to do it, even though he knows it’ll end him. He’s tempted on more than one occasion, but Alan catches it before he can reach for it, pushes him back to work, back into his position. Nothing is the same, everything is grayscale and bleak, but the schedule keeps him afloat, keeps his head above the surface. 

The first few months are too fast and too slow at the same time. The world works under a different timetable, speeding up the periods where he’s okay and stretching the bad parts out. He has more bad parts than he doesn’t, but still things are weird, off-center. Alan keeps in contact, so does Zoe, and so do Kurt and Lacey. In some way, they’re little more than replacements for the things he’s lost, but they manage to keep him to the ground, keep him alive, working into the third month since her death, to the point where the good days start to overtake the cripplingly bad and time starts to reorient itself, starts to look like a straight line instead of a scribbly line. 

He isn’t healed, the wound is still open and he still drinks too much, but it’s something.

* * *

Leviathan comes, Leviathan goes. 

It’s a new record, so few people died. Armsmaster is given the majority of the credit for it, the savior of Brockton Bay. Danny can’t really bring himself to disagree. 

* * *

He puts down the bottle at the fifth month, grudgingly goes to AA. They understand, abstractly, for all that Armsmaster made it a record low for deaths, there’s  _ still _ a number of civilian casualties, and people in Brockton rarely deal with grief in a healthy way. He vents, truly vents, about the shit in his life he’s had to deal with, for the first time in nearly a year, and people console him. 

It’s an odd feeling. 

He meets people there, cycling in and out depending on the meeting. He goes through the steps, throws out the liquor in the house that still feels too empty, absent.

Winter comes, reinforcing that loneliness, that chill, and he somehow still manages to avoid drinking away his nights.

It’s a start.

* * *

Early spring is just as cold as it was the year before, the chill lingering, digging its fingers in. It’s been a few days since he’s slept at home, having found some sort of odd rhythm with Kurt and Lacey that implies more than it probably should. He’s not entirely sure what things are turning into between the three of them, but part of him thinks it's probably best not to dwell too much on it, lest it get ripped out from his hands in a moment of weakness. 

Work has steadied out, and though it’s not a fully confirmed thing, shipping has gradually started to return to Brockton with Leviathan gone. Danny has the unpleasant thought that it’s bad to bet the continued survival of an industry on Endbringers only hitting a place once - seems like a great way to leave yourself vulnerable - but he’s not about to turn it away. Other ports who have dealt with Leviathan, like Brockton Bay, have also dealt with the upswing. Money just about pours into Brockton Bay’s reserves, between the federal Endbringer relief fund and the private industries looking for a new port in a storm, well, things are getting better.

He even gets a confirmation on the ferry, gets a date for when a private firm which subcontracts Tinkers - in a blatant attempt to get around anti-Parahuman laws, but nobody comes down on them, what with being a post-Endbringer relief company - for their equipment will be coming through to pick what they can out of the graveyard and disintegrate what they can’t. Two months, they say, around the date when the anniversary of Taylor’s death will take place. 

He just wishes she was here to see it.

* * *

He’s finally approached by Lacey and Kurt one evening, in between watching a hockey game, about what they’re going to do between the three of them, about intimacy and inclusion. 

It’s embarrassing, he almost rejects them because he feels like he’s getting over things too quickly, too fast, but manages to think himself out of that knot of self-hatred and accepts it. 

He doesn’t go home anymore.

* * *

It’s on a sunny Friday when the private team comes to survey and obliterate the ship graveyard. It’s been less than a week since Taylor’s anniversary, and for all that he should be slumped over a bin, puking his guts out from the liquor, he isn’t. He’s a bit tired, sure, it’s the asscrack of dawn, early enough that even as summer has started to set in it’s cold, and the hardhat that he has is biting a bit into his scalp, but he’s... not happy, no, but  _ here _ , present, okay. 

They’ve situated the drop-off point just off the shore, and about thirty members of the union have been hired to help set it up and keep it in a good place. They’ll be moving a pretty huge amount of metal, even if they’ll be obliterating a good part of it, so there’s no leniency they can take with handling it as they come. A Tinker, outfitted in a mobile, chair-like thing, flies overhead, beneath him a massive, almost comical looking magnet swinging beneath it. Someone to his right says something crude about metal balls, and another hits him in the ribs in retribution, getting a squawk out of the worker.

The sun bares down on them, barely above the horizon, blinding and gold. The sky is clear, the world is calm, waves lapping gently against the sand just down the hill. News vans are parked further up, veritable crowds worth of cameras huddling, trying to get the best shot as one of the major blockages that stops Brockton Bay from returning to its shipping heights is gradually dismantled, removed.

For the first time in a long, long time, even before Taylor, maybe going all the way back to Annette, Danny can’t really help but feel like things are going to work out.


End file.
